Summary

Assessing the Economic Impact of Copyright Reform

In 1997, the Canadian government signed two new copyright-related international treaties adopted by the UN's World Intellectual Protection Organization (WIPO) in December 1996: the WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT) and the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty (WPPT). The objective of this paper is to assess the economic impact of the following new or revised rights (on different groups of stakeholders): extending the term of protection of photographs from "50 years"" to ""the life of the author plus 50 years"" (on publishers), introducing an explicit distribution right (on software makers), introducing legal protection for technological protection measures such as encryption (on publishers; software makers; audio-visual producers, multimedia and movie makers), introducing legal protection for rights management information used to identify works and other subject matters (on authors, composers and artists; software makers; audio-visual producers, multimedia and movie makers; publishers)."